Introducing the Founders: The Post-Millennial Generation

Are you on Snapchat most of the day? Do you have no nostalgic connection to the ’90s? Is having a Facebook account, like, the most embarrassing thing ever? Well, then you are what MTV has dubbed a Founder.

For the last few years, news outlets and companies have struggled with what to call kids who were born in the aughts. For a while, The New York Times had been trying to make Generation Z happen. (It’s not going to happen.) And someone at Apple must have surely tried to coin the term iGen at some point. Then, of course, there was that forgettable attempt at calling them Plurals.

Perhaps it had been so difficult to settle on a name for this new generation because that task has been left in the hands of a bunch of old and out-of-touch millennials. But MTV finally figured out the best way to understand today’s young ones: to simply talk to them. And so, in March, they polled more than 1,000 kids on what they would like to be referred to from now on, ultimately settling on the grandiose title of the Founders.

Founders are those who were born after December 2000 and grew up surrounded by social media. This constant social connection has made Founders incredibly comfortable in the spotlight and, in turn, created a generation of YouTube and Snapchat stars.

Another characteristic of a Founder is having realistic expectations for the future. While millennials tend to believe that anything was within their reach, Founders grew up in a crippled economy, in which their parents struggled to pay the bills or hold down a job. The recession left them with a much more risk-averse mentality than their debt-ridden predecessors.